Anonymity

by Janna McMahan

  Anger ignited in the father. “Are you saying this was our fault? ‘Cause I can tell you right now that none of this is our fault. None of it!”

  Emily was shocked by the man's sudden vitriol. His anger was such a stark contrast to her own father's gentle nature. Emily could see how Lorelei could feel threatened and controlled by this man.

  “No, sir. Not at all,” David said calmly. “I'm just asking what the reasons could be.”

  “Well, we've been asking ourselves the same thing for about three years now. And I can tell you…”

  “She's sick,” Maggie interjected.

  Everyone waited.

  “Mentally ill. That's what the doctors said.”

  “I understand,” David said. “It's quite common for mental illness to run in families.”

  They both looked at David blankly.

  “What do you mean?” Maggie asked in a tender voice.

  “Your son, Noah. Rose tells us he's schizophrenic.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Maggie said. “We don't have a son named Noah.”

  It was now David and Emily's turn to be confused.

  “You do have other children?” David said.

  “We have four boys,” Elias said. “All married with children, living happy lives in Salt Lake. We don't have a schizophrenic son named Noah. Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Why would she say that?” Maggie asked her husband. “That's strange.”

  “She did, didn't she? Told you she had a brother named Noah. That's a new one.”

  David lowered his head in contemplation. The Kimballs looked at each other, at Emily, at David, then at each other again, waiting for somebody to make sense.

  “Okay,” Emily said. “She told us that she has been moving around the country looking for a long-lost brother, but you say there is no lost brother?”

  “She lies,” Elias said. “She lies all the time. You blame us. I know you do. Everybody always blames the parents. But she's very hard to control.”

  “There is no reason to place blame, Mr. Kimball,” David said.

  “Do you have any idea what it's like to watch your child change into a stranger? A kid making straight A's and then suddenly she's flunking? A kid who used to be all the teachers’ favorite, and she starts getting in trouble for not paying attention and speaking out of turn in class? Don't act like you understand.” His voice had continued to rise. His wife laid a hand on his leg. He got up and walked toward the lobby.

  “Give him a minute, he'll come back,” she said. “He's not a bad man. He just can't grasp why she won't just snap out of it and act like she's supposed to.”

  “You have to be her advocate,” David said. “If your husband finds it difficult to be an effective parent, he could use some counseling of his own to help him deal with things.”

  She shook her head. “You can forget that.”

  “How old is Rose?”

  “She'd be seventeen by now.”

  “She's seventeen?”

  “She was fifteen when she left. Didn't even have her driver's license. I don't know how she's made it all over the country like she has.”

  “What was her diagnosis?” David asked. “Is it bipolar? We get a lot of kids who struggle with manic depression.”

  But before she could answer, Elias Kimball returned. He appeared much calmer.

  Maggie took a big breath and whispered, “Yes. The doctors say it's bipolar.”

  When her husband spoke, Maggie demurred. “We just thought she was really moody, just acting out. Those tattoos. She really went overboard with those. They're hard to take. We're LDS. We believe tattoos defile the temple of your body. Why would she do that to herself? To us?”

  “Many people with bipolar defy authority. It could be that. It could be that she enjoys the sensation of getting the tattoos. She could find it pleasurable. People with bipolar are high-level pleasure seekers. Anything that gives an adrenaline surge would be attractive to them. Addictive even.”

  “Like sex,” the father said.

  “Yes,” David said quietly. “Sexual promiscuity is one of the most common symptoms of bipolar disorder.”

  “She did that. At home. We were afraid she was getting a reputation,” the father hung his head as he spoke. “It all started about the same time, her school problems, her interest in boys. It's shameful. We raised Rose to be respectful of herself and others. But she turned out…” He couldn't continue.

  “Mr. Kimball, Elias. Rose has a disease just like diabetes or cancer. She needs treatment and support. This is not a character flaw.”

  The mother twisted a tissue into corkscrews in her tiny hands. “We know you're right. She has crazy mood swings—one minute she'd be buzzing around the kitchen helping me. She'd cook a dozen dishes and bake pies and cookies and read. Lord, that girl could read two books a day. She never slept. Then, like somebody pulled a curtain over her, she'd take to bed, and I couldn't get her out, not to go to school or anything.”

  “Sounds like she's a rapid-cycler,” David said.

  “That's what the doctors called it,” the mother said.

  “At first we thought she was on drugs, so we sent her to counseling, but that didn't change a thing. It just seemed to make her mad,” the father said. “The counselor said he couldn't tell if she was using or not. Big fat waste of money.”

  “So,” the mother continued, “Elias decided to send her to one of those wilderness camps for troubled teens. He said it would straighten her out. When she came back, she seemed calmer, but that wore off too.”

  “So I had her committed,” Elias said. “It was a last resort. She's old enough to drive, but I wasn't going to let her get her license until she calmed down. I couldn't have her out all wild, driving around, out of control. I have a responsibility to the community.”

  “Of course, that upset her,” Maggie went on. “She was supposed to get her learner's permit, but Elias wouldn't let her until she shaped up. We thought for sure that would be something that would make her fly straight.”

  “But it was like she couldn't help herself. And lie, that girl would lie to your face and not blink. So I sent her to a mental hospital,” he said, emotion tickling his voice.

  “We did,” Maggie said. “We sent her to a mental health facility for a month. That's when they told us her diagnosis. They started prescribing all these medications that caused all these side effects.”

  “But they calmed her butt down,” Elias said defiantly.

  “They did,” the mother said, nodding agreement, looking at the twist of tissue in her lap. “But she hated them. She'd drag around like a zombie half the time. I don't know which was worse. As long as I controlled her pills it seemed like she came back into balance, but when we tried letting her do it herself, she'd always forget, or she'd say she felt fine and then she wouldn't take them, and in no time she'd be right back where she started.”

  “Then she ran away,” Elias said. “She ran off after the hospital stay. This whole illness has been a financial disaster for us. We can't leave Rose alone. My wife lost her job because of absences. The older she gets, the worse it gets.”

  “It's the most desperate feeling in the world to watch your child destroy herself,” Maggie said, her voice pleading for understanding. “Mood disorder. They called it that. A mood disorder.”

  “It sounds like you've done everything you could,” David said. “Bipolar is difficult to recognize in kids. Sometimes, the depressive part of the disease shows up first, so people just think their children are depressed. When the manic part shows up later, it can seem like ADHD.”

  Mood disorder. It all made sense—Lorelei's abrupt arrivals and even quicker departures. Her fluctuating tides of energy. Her sexual advances. Quick anger. The tattoos.

  And the brother story. There was logic to creating Noah to take the blame, a brother with all the same problems. Why not tell a story where Lorelei is the savior instead of the rejected one? She was convincing. Had she told the st
ory so many times that she'd begun to believe it herself?

  “Every time the phone rings,” the mother said, “I never think it means my daughter is coming home. I always think someone is calling to tell me that they found Rose dead.”

  Lorelei

  AFTER LORELEI fled the fight, she had come upon a church and slipped around back to the burial grounds. She bedded down in bushes, but there was no way she could sleep. She rocked, clutching her knees to her chest, her heart's rhythm matching her flurry of thoughts.

  So Leo had found her. He had warned her that he would. The tail feathers on her phoenix had been tingling at the edge of her eye, making her think about him, so she should have known he would show up.

  Lorelei had thought she could just leave him behind like she had so many other situations. She'd run away from her home, an unbearable life filled with her weeping mother and her angry father. Since then, her life had become a progression of a few months here a few months there. The community house, different friends. Her year with Leo had been a long stay in her otherwise transient existence. It had started out safe, romantic even, but ended up quite another way.

  After her Haida boyfriend left in the middle of the night, Lorelei had taken up with a group of travelers. Along the way, she'd met Road Dogg. He was in his early twenties, tall and thin and sprinkled with tattoos. He had the traveler railroad tracks on his arm. Each letter of his name was inked across one of his knuckles. He talked about road literature like Jack Kerouac and Jack London. He liked Ray Bradbury's work and Stephen King.

  He'd gotten her a job picking up nails on construction sites. Road Dogg had been all over the country and said that kids in the north worked while kids in the south begged. He said, “Never be a beggar.” She'd earned enough that she didn't have to wear shelter clothes. She had a nice sleeping bag and a small tarp. Road Dogg kept her jumping, finding day jobs for them on Craigslist. They did drywall, framing and gardening.

  The day he decided to leave for warmer climes, Lorelei had tagged along. They piled into an old minivan with a ragtag bunch of other kids. They left the massive green trees of Oregon for the steely cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway. Lorelei had never seen the ocean and was so enthralled that she imagined flinging herself over the edge to see if she could fly off into the golden horizon.

  The trip had taken weeks. New friends flowed in and out of their lives. They stopped at festivals where they found temporary work serving up vegan meals to patchouli-smelling crowds of groovy music lovers. They slept in fields and abandoned houses. But what started out as the best road trip ever took a turn for the worse when they rolled into Southern California.

  Los Angeles was a tangle of highways. The first serious urban center she'd ever experienced, L.A. was all hard edges and concrete. She'd been surprised by the amount of barbed wire. To her, barbed wire was for keeping cattle in, but apparently in the city, it was for keeping people out. She liked the graffiti, but some of it was poorly rendered, and it gave her a creepy, depressed feeling. It reminded her of her latest tattoo, a lightning bolt she'd let someone scrape under her eye, an immediate regret.

  They were disappointed to find that the community house where Road Dogg usually crashed had burned to the foundation. Somebody told them neighbors set the building afire because it had turned into a squat.

  The rest of the pack decided to drive on to Vegas, but Road Dogg stayed to visit a friend with a tattoo studio. Road Dogg had become like a big brother to her, so Lorelei stayed too.

  Inside Leo's L.A., mesmerizing music pinged softly underneath the razz of tattoo guns. It smelled sterile, like the entire studio had just been autoclaved. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with colorful Japanese dragons and vivid lotus flowers, scarlet swelling hearts and 1940s hula girls. Snakes, skulls, crossbones and flames were tacked everywhere.

  Road Dogg walked into the back, where the buzzing grew louder. Artists leaned over tables and massage chairs where clients exposed various body parts.

  He stopped at an open doorway. Tracing paper with sketches lifted gently from the walls. There were pages cut from magazines and black-and-white photographs of arms and legs and backs.

  It was magical.

  “Hey, man. What up?” her friend said.

  “Dogg! Come on in. Good to see you, man. Who's your chick?”

  “This is Lorelei.”

  “Right on, man. Nice to meet you, Lorelei.”

  Leo wasn't like anyone she'd ever met. He had the exaggerated muscles of a body builder and the thick neck that Lorelei had always found repulsive on her school's football players. But somehow it all worked on Leo. The tattoos were plentiful, but not excessive. Somehow she felt an attraction to him even though he had to be in his thirties.

  Road Dogg and Leo knuckle bumped like old friends.

  “Still working I see,” Road Dogg said.

  “Yeah, man. You know me. I've got ink for blood.”

  “Got any new work?”

  Leo pulled his shirt over his head to show an orange koi swimming from under his arm up over his left shoulder. Lorelei had never seen such an exquisite tattoo.

  “That's freaking awesome, man,” Road Dogg said.

  Leo examined one of Road Dogg's arms. “You've got to do something about those rough tats. Stop with the stick and poke, dude.”

  “You know me, man. It's like a bad habit. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't have the money for somebody with your talents.”

  Leo turned to Lorelei. “What about you? This idiot here do that to your face?”

  She touched the sad excuse for a lightning bolt.

  “Hell, no. I didn't do that mess,” Leo said. “You should fix her up, man. Can you make it look better?”

  Leo nodded. “Sure, I can fix that.”

  “I don't have any money,” Lorelei said.

  “That's cool. Girl as pretty as you shouldn't be left with that mess on her face. You've got to think about it though. I'm not going to do a cover on you just to do a cover. It's got to be something you like.”

  “He's serious,” Road Dogg said. “He won't do somebody who just walks in off the street and wants to pick one out of a book.”

  Leo gestured to one section of wall where recognizable designs dominated. “This is what you call flash stock art.” He pointed to another section. “That's my original artwork. I prefer to do something that means something to a person.”

  She scanned the designs.

  “Tattoos—longest shelf life of any product, highest buyer's remorse,” Leo said.

  Road Dogg and Lorelei found a camp of kids outside the city because he didn't like shelters. Road Dogg worked a lot and included Lorelei when she would come. They picked strawberries and broccoli in enormous fields where she met families of migrant workers who shared their beans and rice. They were illegals, the people her father talked about who took jobs in factories and slaughterhouses that rightfully belonged to Americans. Lorelei wasn't so sure that these people were hurting anybody.

  One afternoon, while Road Dogg was out harvesting Brussels sprouts, she came into the city by herself. At the tattoo studio, a chesty brunette was in Leo's chair. He was detailing a flower on her hand while a drunken, sullen man looked on. The woman seemed so stoned that she might go to sleep even while needles punctured her skin.

  It took Lorelei only a second to realize that the man was talking smack about his woman, and it was making Leo mad.

  “Put my name on her ass,” the guy said.

  The woman nodded, “It's okay,” she said.

  Leo locked eyes with the man, but said to the woman, “I won't ink his name on you.”

  “You put what I tell you to put on her,” the guy said.

  “That's it,” Leo said, stripping off his latex gloves—snap, snap. “We're done here. Take your business somewhere else.”

  “You got to finish her.”

  “You don't want me working on anybody as pissed off as I am right now.”

  “You haven't
even done me yet. I want one of those hula girls there with her tits all hanging out. I want it here.” He pointed to a vacant space among the lewd sleeve on his arm.

  Something changed in Leo's eyes. He said, “Fine, have a seat.”

  The woman got up, and the man settled into Leo's chair. Lorelei watched from the doorway. Within minutes the idiot's forehead was sprinkled with beads of sweat. Lorelei could tell Leo held the needle in the same spot longer than necessary. She'd seen him work twice as fast. When the guy ended up with his head between his knees, his girlfriend moved in to console him.

  As the idiot was leaving, he had turned to Leo and said, “You're the worst damn tattoo artist I've ever seen.”

  Leo just smiled.

  “I can't believe you made him sick,” Lorelei said.

  “He deserved it. You don't treat a woman that way.”

  That was all it took.

  She never went back to the migrant camp.

  Leo lived in a modern apartment above the studio. Not the worst place she'd ever crashed. The first night was awkward. She'd assured him that she was eighteen. He looked dubious, but let the subject drop.

  He was a considerate lover, but nothing like her Indian love. Just the thought of that lean, dark-skinned boy caused her owl tattoo to pulse. But Leo made her feel wanted and protected. And for a while, that was enough.

  They looked through books and discussed the meanings of certain tattoos to fix her eye. She decided on a phoenix, the bird that self-destructs in flames, then rises from her own ashes, reborn beautiful and strong. After he'd drawn a dozen options, they finally arrived at a carefully considered bird that would mask her previously shoddy work.

  Before she starting getting tattoos, the worst pain she had ever endured was the prick of a dentist. But being tattooed gave her a crystal clear burn that brought her clarity, a searing sensation, as if the world were made of glass. After a while, pain became a background to the hum of her thoughts, and she relaxed into a trance.

  Once her face work was finished, Lorelei began to sneak into Leo's workspace and watermark the inside of her arm where the skin was thin and tender. It was worse than a bee sting, but the adrenaline jolt that seared her for that second left her alive and tingly. She'd be happy and calm for days afterward.